In the food service field, there is a growing trend toward making meal or snack purchases more convenient by providing delivery to the customer's home. In present systems for the home delivery of pizza, one procedure is to prepare a handwritten order indicating the type of pizza and desired toppings, and beverages, the customer's name and address, and the cost of purchase. Such an order form is then utilized by a delivery person to identify a given order and to locate the customer's home. Any illegibility or ambiguity in the hand entered data can greatly delay delivery and lead to customer dissatisfaction. Also, it has been found that the manual system may be subverted with resulting difficulties in reconciling the amount of cash turned in by each driver for a given working period with the amounts expected based on a manual processing of the order forms ostensibly assigned to each driver. Such a reconciliation may become very time consuming for a manager as a larger number of drivers work each shift.
Any effort to improve such food delivery operations should be of maximum simplicity and modularity, and ideally should be adaptable to existing operations with only modest changes in the work routine of each employee. The modularity of the system should permit the accommodation of progressively greater volume and an increase in the number of stores in a system without radical changes in the nature of the equipment and in the order processing procedure, while yet yielding enhanced efficiency and economies of scale.